This presentation will address three questions in the area of safety training from an insurance perspective:
How have training programs contributed to the reduction of losses?
What does an insurance company expect in a safety and health training program?
How could the ANSI Z490 Benchmarking Safety, Health and Environmental Training standard help insurance companies and their policyholders set up new and better programs?
During 1998, policyholders of Liberty Mutual achieved over 100 loss reduction results incorporating safety and health training as a component of the business plan to control risk. These results demonstrated future cost savings in the billions. Out of those 100+ results, there were at least four that relied on safety training as the major component of the control plan. Take a look at how training contributed to the control of loss in those four examples:
An aluminum tubing manufacturer identified the need to evaluate and establish a control plan for manual materials handling injuries at stretcher tables and chop saw lines. The stretcher table straightens tubing; the chop saw cuts the tubing to its proper length.
Conduct two days of ergonomic training for plant management and engineering prior to a major capital improvement project for these tasks. One outcome of this training was the engineers identifying two primary manual handling hazards in the existing operations suitable for redesign, using the concepts of the training program. The project groups developed and applied action plans, including ergonomic assessments to the hazardous task components. This resulted in cost effective design changes to the stretcher table and chop saw operations.
The design changes implemented will eliminate task components which have produced manual handling injuries in the past. Engineers who attended the ergonomics training demonstrated their learning through application of the principles taught. Eliminating the associated injuries is expected to save approximately $36,000 per year. This does not include the noninsured cost of such claims, the "time value" of money, or the "hard costs" of the design changes. The customer had 114 manual materials handling injuries since April 1996, yielding an average cost of $715 per case, or $36,207 per year.
An egg producer had been trying all the traditional methods in their safety program in order to control losses. The program had an effect, but the losses had leveled out over the past two years. The customer wanted to obtain additional information on how to jump the safety program to the next level.
